


Acquired Reading

by redfiona



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, late prompt response
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:30:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2616923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Albus was used to being different, to standing out and apart, but he'd never felt so detached from everyone else.  Hogwarts, as always, provides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acquired Reading

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the lgbtfest 2008 prompt: Harry Potter: Albus Dumbledore. Albus is seventeen, and he thinks he's the only person in the world who has these feelings. Then he stumbles on the Room of Requirement, which is full of books he's never heard of before.

He has no idea what to do with himself. He has no idea who he is anymore. Albus Dumbledore was, no matter what else happened, a good student. Good students paid attention in class. Their minds didn't drift off to _other_ things, the way his now did constantly.

Like Gellert's smile, the way the left side of his mouth quirked up and the how his eyes twinkled when he was happy.

Or the way his face flushed when they'd over-extended themselves and their magic. On one occasion, the top button of Gellert's shirt had come undone. Albus could see that the flush went down to his chest. He wanted to follow it, with his hands, with his lips, to see where it would end, if it ended.

He's in love and he knows it. It would be foolish to deny it. It's a tightness in his chest, a lightness in his head and a general giddy feeling. But it's Gellert he's in love with, beautiful, brilliant Gellert. Who, along with being the most amazing wizard Albus had ever known, is a man. Which would be such a stupidly obvious statement that it should have gotten points docked from Gryffindor were it not for the fact that wizards weren’t supposed to feel like this, or not about each other. Witches were where his amorous interests were supposed to lie. It was why there were those tattered sepia prints of witches doing the rounds of the Gryffindor dormitory.

Gellert's masculinity, his handsome strength, too refined to be rugged, already too robust to be boyish, didn't disgust him despite people saying that it should. Albus isn't sure that it would have, even if it hadn't been Gellert he felt this way about. It's not as though every man turned his head but he suspects that Gellert will not be the only man he ever finds attractive, although he can't imagine anyone ever being as amazing as Gellert. It’s so very confusing.

It was all well and good to say he should seek advice, but who or what? How could he tell anyone about this? Who could he ask? Albus supposed that someone else must feel this way, but he didn't know anyone well enough to ask, and even if he had, he didn't know how to ask. Wizards didn't talk about things like this, and he had no close friends, definitely none close enough to speak to about this. He had no idea how to proceed in general. It was strange that meeting one of the few wizards who could keep up with him, and actually exceeded his talent, had made him feel even more alone because there was no-one else he could turn to, no-one whose counsel he trusted as much as Gellert.

On the off-chance, he even checked the library, just in case there was anything in there that might help him. There wasn’t, something he could have guessed. He knew the library catalogue from back to front and there was nothing there to aid him, no books even vaguely touching the subject.

He was walking through the school one day, thinking about his problem as he frequently, distractedly did when he saw an open doorway leading to a room full of books. He'd not seen a door there before, but it was Hogwarts, trying to keep track of the rooms was pointless. Albus was curious enough to go into the room, wherever it had sprung from. Hogwarts had looked after him so far and if he didn't reappear in the Gryffindor house room someone would send the head of house to look for him eventually.

There were hundreds of books in the room, different styles, different exact topics, different languages but all on the same theme, that of men who loved other men, and the occasional lady who loved other ladies. There were books on art, on society, on social mores. Some suggested what to do, with diagrams that weren't obscene but still made Albus blush. The books he was most grateful for though were the ones where he could tell that it was the author's experience fictionalised. He wasn't the only person to feel like this.

It didn't solve his problems, and it didn't give him any solid advice about what he should do, but he knew now that he wasn't alone.

~~~~

Many years later, when Dumbledore is appointed headmaster, and the first great Wizarding War is over, he organises an expansion of the Hogwarts library, so that it includes a fiction section and a wider range of non-fiction.  


~~~~

The End

**Author's Note:**

> This is also a kind of love letter to my high school library, which might not have been all that big, but nonetheless contained all the wonders of the world. And lent me the Harry Potter books when my form tutor recommended them.


End file.
